Dot Wordsworth

Gibbous

issue 15 October 2011

‘A gibbous moon,’ my husband observed the other night, as indeed the moon must be for almost half the time. But when he asked me where the word came from, I could hardly say. That is because, as a girl, I was denied a proper classical education.

I did know where to find out, though, and it comes straight from the Latin gibbus, ‘hunchbacked’, which hardly gets us much further. (The initial hard g in the English word is anomalous.) The related Greek word is kuphos, but this is not the word Homer used in the description of Thersites in the Iliad where William Cowper in his translation wrote: ‘Gibbous shoulders, o’er his breast contracted, pinch’d it.’

Homer’s word is kurto (kurtos, ‘bulging’). Alexander Pope, however, chose mountain when he translated the Iliad. Part of his passage describing Thersites came out like this:

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